Variations in early relational vocabulary development: how do children become language-specific users?

Abstract

By preschool age, children become wordsmiths. Among their early learned words, relational terms such as verbs and prepositions are demanding to acquire. In the process of learning these words, children are first language-general users, detecting and categorizing event components and spatial relations similarly (nonlinguistic event concepts), despite the language environment they are born to. They later become language-specific users with exposure to their native language. This process is mediated and/or moderated by internal and external factors such as children's own attentional patterns or neonatal status (e.g., being preterm) and parents' use of specific vocabularies. This review paper integrates recent evidence from the dynamic and interactive process of learning words for spatial relations, motion events, and causal events. The review specifies the intricate relations among different factors for learning relational words by particularly providing data from longitudinal and cross-sectional studies with full-term and preterm Turkish-learning children. We suggest a multilevel, and multifactor approach to studying early relational vocabulary development.